AWS launches new time series database

AWS announced a new time series database today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. The new product called Amazon Timestream is a fully managed database designed to track items over time, which can be particularly useful for Internet of Things scenarios.

“With time series data, each data point consists of a timestamp and one or more attributes and it really measures how things change over time and helps drive real time decisions,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained.

He sees a problem though with existing open source and commercial solutions, which he says don’t scale well and are hard to manage. This is of course a problem that a cloud service like AWS often helps solve.

Not surprising as their customers were looking for a good time series database solution, AWS decided to create one themselves. Jassy said that they built Amazon Timestream from the ground up with an architecture that organizes data by time intervals and enables time series specific data compression, which leads to less scanning and faster performance.

“Timestream automates rollups, retention, tiering and compression, so time-series data can be efficiently stored and processed. Timestream’s query engine adapts to the location and format of data making it easier and faster to query time-series data,” AWS’s Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post summarizing several new announcements including Timestream.

AWS claims Timestream will be a thousand times faster at a tenth of cost of a relational database, and of course it scales up and down as required and includes all of the analytics capabilities you need to understand all of the data you are tracking.